Ale under the veil: the only brewery in Pakistan

The Murree Brewery is thriving in one of the world's strictest Islamic states.

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Quality control at the Murree Brewery, RawalpindiPhoto: Alixandra Fazzina

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Checking the barrels at the Murree Brewery, RawalpindiPhoto: Alixandra Fazzina

By Jonathan Foreman

7:00AM GMT 24 Mar 2012

Pakistan is one of the last countries in Asia where you would expect to discover a flourishing – and legal – brewery, especially these days. There is only the one. But its beer is a world-class lager, long celebrated throughout the subcontinent.

And the Murree Brewery Company, established in 1860 to slake the thirst of Her Majesty’s soldiery in their broiling Punjab cantonments, is also a distillery that produces a prize-winning malt whisky. Moreover, it is one of Pakistan’s most beloved and successful business enterprises.

The survival – let alone the success – of the Murree Brewery is remarkable not so much because Pakistan is an Islamic republic (there are, after all, several other Muslim-majority countries that produce beer, including Egypt, Malaysia and Turkey), but because the forces of extremism that have brought the Pakistani state to its knees loathe alcohol and those who drink it.

Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab who was murdered in January last year for opposing Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws, had long been the object of a hostile internet campaign featuring photographs of him and his family drinking wine, and was seen by many as leading an Islamically unclean 'haram’ way of life.

It is an open secret that the English-speaking Pakistani elite enjoy a drink. President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, is said to be no teetotaller, and his predecessor, General Pervez Musharraf, like many old-school Pakistani military officers, liked his whisky.

But alcohol and its consumption have become an inflammatory issue in Pakistan as the country’s religious right has grown stronger and more violent. The wealthy, Westernised bubble in which the hard-drinking, veil-rejecting upper class has frolicked is no longer as secure as it once was.

To find out how and why the Murree Brewery has managed to survive and thrive, I visited the company’s plant. You would expect it to be in a relatively discreet and secure location, and it is, at least by the standards of sprawling, chaotic Rawalpindi.

By good fortune, the Murree Brewery is in an obscure lane off the road that leads to Army House, an imposing Victorian building that is the official home of Pakistan’s Chief of General Staff, and which once belonged to one of the founding families of the Murree Brewery. This position means that the roads around the brewery are well watched, but that is no guarantee of security: terrorists attacked the army’s nearby General Headquarters in 2009.

Some of the buildings on the site are Edwardian, others were built in the 1930s and 40s, but the whole place looks as if it was transported brick by brick from a northern English town. The signs on each building announcing water demineralisation or general store are all hand-painted in wobbly script. But within the various sheds and warehouses and the German brewhouse built in 1967 the equipment is shiny and modern, including stainless-steel kettles supplied by the British company Briggs of Burton.

All the brewing, distilling, canning and bottling takes place on this one site. Elaborately painted lorries bring in the pure ingredients that go into making a premium beer, as well as bottles from the company’s own glass factory. Unlike breweries in Europe, Murree malts its own barley – all of which is imported from Australia – on the floors of vast, dimly lit rooms. The hops come from Germany, and the water is drawn from the company’s tube wells beneath the brewery.

In different areas of the site there are different smells: malt, yeast, molasses. Here and there workers in blue uniforms with mbc over their breast pockets mind machinery or stir seas of grain. There are 400 employees, almost of all of them Muslim and from Rawalpindi. Many are the third or fourth generation of their families to work for the company. About 150 live in the brewery’s residential colony. Some are strictly teetotal; others, including those who work for Murree’s tasting panels, are happy consumers of its alcoholic products.

The Murree Brewery Company was founded in 1860 by the engineer Sir Proby Cautley, best known for supervising the building of the Ganges canal, and Gen William Olpherts VC, a hero of the 1857 Indian mutiny, to provide beer for the thousands of British troops then stationed in the area. They hired an engineer named Edward Dyer, a pioneer of hot-country beer-making, to set up the brewery. It was built just outside Murree, an attractive hill station that sits at the foot of the Pir Panjal range, and which is still a favourite summer get­away for citizens of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Murree was one of the first modern beer breweries in Asia, predating by several decades China’s German-built Tsingtao, and the Philippines’ Spanish-built San Miguel. The beer produced by Murree – then branded Murree London Lager – was good enough to win international medals for excellence at the 1867 World’s Fair and the 1876 Philadelphia Exhibition. The product was such a hit with local Indian consumers that the company established additional breweries in Quetta in 1886 (later destroyed in an earthquake) and in Rawalpindi in 1889. In those days its marketing slogan was 'Eat, drink and be Murree’.

Murree Brewery was also one of the first public companies of the subcontinent and is the oldest continuing industrial enterprise in Pakistan. Its shares were traded on the floor of the Calcutta Stock Exchange beginning in 1902, and were still traded there a century later. For many years it was owned by the Whymper family, one of whose scions was the mountaineer Edward, who conquered the Matterhorn. But for more than six decades it has been owned by the Bhandara family, who are Parsees – descendants of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia after its conquest by the Arabs.

By 1910 the company was finding it increasingly difficult to source clean water in Murree itself and transferred all its brewing to Rawalpindi. It had just sold the old brewery buildings in Murree when they were burnt down by an anti-Hindu mob during the Partition riots of 1947-8.

The company reached the height of prosperity during the Second World War. Thanks to the presence of thousands of Allied forces in India, the brewery sold more than 1.6 million gallons of beer a year. After Independence and Partition, Murree’s market shrank, though a law that forbade Pakistani Muslims to drink could be easily subverted by a doctor’s certificate saying that the bearer required alcohol for medical reasons. The company diversified into soft drink and juice production in the late 1960s.

More serious prohibition came into effect in 1977. The ban was imposed by prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a populist effort to cultivate the religious right. After Bhutto was overthrown and executed by the ardently religious dictator General Zia ul-Haq, the state closed down the Murree brewery. Two years later a court held that the closure contravened minority rights – its owners being Parsees – and the brewery was back in business, ostensibly serving the alcoholic needs of the non-Muslim population.

Today, Murree’s market for its alcohol products is theoretically limited to members of the country’s religious minorities and Pakistan’s very small number of foreign tourists and expats. Moreover its products may be sold only in the country’s 70 or so licensed shops. Only six of these licences are in the country’s politically and culturally dominant Punjab province, which has a population of more than 70 million. There are none in Rawalpindi because a devout right-wing minister of tourism took away the licence previously held by Flashman’s Hotel.

If you are non-Muslim Pakistani in Punjab and have a permit, you are allowed to buy six bottles of whisky or one case of beer per month. ('Not enough,’ jokes the company’s technical manager, Fakher Mahmood.) Given that the company produces some 820 million half-litre bottles of beer, whisky, vodka, brandy and other alcoholic drinks per annum – and that those minorities make up less than five per cent of Pakistan’s 170 million people, those Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Parsees and pagan animists would have to be consuming more than 90 bottles per person per year, man, woman and child.

But everyone knows that the market for alcohol in Pakistan is enormous and crosses all classes. There is so much drinking that newspapers carry advertisements for alcoholism treatment and frequent stories of peasants dying from drinking moonshine. Pakistan’s drinking community includes consumers of vast amounts of home-distilled country liquor, whisky smuggled from India or the Gulf, vodka smuggled over the mountains from China, and wine bought from embassies. Murree’s production is dwarfed by a black market ocean of imported, smuggled or counterfeit booze that finds its way into permit shops, illegal bars and private houses.

As one of the company’s managers helpfully explained, this means that Murree has to compete on price and authenticity. A bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label – the favourite tipple of the subcontinent – costs at least 4,000 rupees (£50) a bottle, usually closer to 7,000 (£90). Murree’s most expensive whisky – its 21-year-old malt – retails for 2,500 rupees (£30). But if Murree sells about 900,000 bottles of whisky per year, the bootleggers sell at least two million. Much of it is fake. Which is why one Murree official concluded an interview with me by saying, 'Thank God they can’t make fake beer.’

Fakher Mahmood and the company’s general manager, Mohammed Javed, who have 37 years service between them, are both Muslim and both wonderfully enthusiastic about their product. They know their beer and they keep up with it, regularly attending conferences and festivals in Germany and elsewhere. Both are particular fans of Murree Classic. 'It has a very round taste with perfect bitterness and very smooth,’ Mahmood says. He adds that Murree’s products are superior to any brew produced across the border in India: 'Ours is better than Kingfisher. There is no doubt. But we have not been allowed to export. If we had been, we would have given them a tough time.’

The original Murree beer is 4.5 per cent alcohol, but in 1991 the company introduced its top-selling Murree Classic brand (5.5 per cent) and, nine years later, Murree’s Millennium beer (7.5 per cent). An experimental Lite Pils beer (3.5 per cent) has not done so well. All four are lagers. During my visit there is much more bottling of spirits than beer because, as Javed says, 'in Pakistan people drink beer in the summer’. Seventy per cent of the company’s eight million litres are bought between March and July.

The current CEO and owner, Isphanyar Bhandara, whose father, the politician Minocher 'Minoo’ Bhandara, was at the helm for half a century, has long been infuriated by the hypocrisy of the law that has prevented him from exporting Murree’s beer or whisky. Sitting in his wood-panelled office beneath framed scenes of imperial heroics from an 1890s Murree calendar, the thirty­some-thing businessman points out that Pakistan is one of the world’s biggest exporters of ethanol – raw alcohol that is subsequently turned into booze and perfume – while he has not been allowed to export his refined alcohol products. But this seems to be changing. This winter, Pakistan’s Ministry of Commerce agreed to change the law so that Pakistan can export beer and spirits to any non-Islamic country (in defiance of Islamist opinion, but perhaps motivated by the country’s desperate need for foreign exchange). Murree is now looking for distributors in Britain and India.

Unlike his father, Bhandara has eschewed political life. He is something of a playboy and his hobby is classic cars. He rarely drinks, but believes that 'if people don’t get their innocent pleasures like a Scotch or a beer they will turn to other things that are more harmful than alcohol, like dangerous drugs.’ (Pakistan has a huge and growing heroin problem.) That the brewery survives may be because Pakistan’s rulers are aware of this – and of Murree’s symbolism: its ongoing existence is evidence that this is still a pluralist country tolerant of religious minorities.

Rashed Rahman, the editor of the Daily Times newspaper, believes that the Murree Brewery’s survival also owes much to vaguely affectionate memories of the British Raj. 'Everyone knows that when the gora sahibs ['white masters’] were here the beer that Murree produced was the only thing that stopped them from going nuts in the heat,’ he jokes.

Certainly, when people such as Bhandara speak of aspects of Pakistani culture inherited from the Raj, it is without the resentment that often accompanies such talk in India. When he talks of his plans to export Murree to Britain he points out that it 'is a distinguished 150-year-old British beer’. He wants to use the advertising slogan invented by his father, 'Have a Murree with your curry’, and once he finds a suitable distributor in Britain, a licensed version of Murree Classic could be coming to a curry house near you very soon.